I stopped listening when I heard what room Amber Naslund’s session was going to be at. Stopped listening to the point that I almost missed the announcement for the last session, “Battledecks and Pecha Kucha”. Host, me. Once it dawned on me, my jaw dropped.
My face must have been pretty funny, because C.C. Chapman cracked up.
You see, when the initial schedule for PodCamp Boston 4 was released, I didn’t see the listing my session on Sunday morning. I figured it didn’t get picked because they’d had enough options, or it was “teaching” something specific (rather, the goal was to have for people practice, showcase, and let their presentation skills be judge by a jury of their peers). I never bothered to recruit contestants, or find companies to donate prizes.
It was with this assumption that I entered PCB4, day 2.
After the announcement, I scrambled down to the second floor to tell anyone that arrived that sorry, no panel will be happening.
That worked for the first couple people that came in. Then, for some reason, people started staying. I’m not sure whether they thought I was joking, or they thought it was like college where you can relax if the professor doesn’t show, or if they just liked to watch me sweat. I think it was the latter.
At one point, Chris Brogan stuck his head in, rang out a few lines from a rap song, and waited to see who got it. I was the only one. It was Jay Z’s “99 Problems” – a fitting song, really.
John Eckman was one of these stay-arounders. He sat all the way in the back of the room, and just kind of enjoyed the scene, thowing out “helpful” tips: The differences between Pecha Kucha and Ignite talks; or that every slide in Slide Karaoke is from a different deck; or that you can do Battle Decks by just picking random decks in SlideShare.
That was it!
I rushed to set my MacBook up to the projector and pulled up SlideShare. There was no contest, and no prizes, but we’d see how a few people do giving a presentation that they’d never seen.
I called out for volunteers, but the overwhelming response was that I had to go first. No surprise there, really. I looked down the front page of SlideShare, and right in the “Hot on Twitter” section was “24 Reasons Why Twitter Sucks.” Perfect!
Not my normal style for public speaking, to be sure, but a lot of fun.
Next up was Stacy Crosby, who confessed to not being a very comfortable public speaker. Regardless, Stacy nailed it, walking us through how to have a successful Pecha Kucha presentation.
Last up was that tag-team duo of John Eckman and Ari Herzog, presenting “Fail Harder”.
What started as a fail turned out to be a lot of fun. A big thanks to Trish Fontanilla for recording and uploading the presentations. I’m thankful for everyone that stayed there and didn’t let me off the hook – it was because of you that the session happened at all! The best compliment of the weekend came later that day on Twitter:
Leslie Poston and Christine Major were there and want to do something similar at PodCamp New Hampshire in October – but on purpose, of course. I think something like this would be a great basis for a local networking event – people having fun, not taking themselves too seriously, practicing their ad lib presentation skills. What do you think?
